News Corp’s Education Tablet

The Amplify Tablet will be a 10 inch tablet running Google Android with a custom user interface and educational software. It’s manufactured by Asus, but it will be sold under the Amplify brand (much like the Asus-built Nexus 7 tablet is sold by Google). It features an NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor, an 8.5 hour battery, an IPS display, and a 5MP camera. According to the spec sheet, it’s “similar to the Asus Transformer Pad TF300TL),

The tablets will sell for $299 and up, and News Corp will also charge schools a subscription fee for software and support. A higher-end Amplify Tablet Plus, for students who do not have wireless access at home, comes with a 4G data plan and costs $349.

According the the NY Times, the Amplify Tablet enters a market crowded with competitors trying to tap into K-12 classrooms, which spend around $3 billion a year on traditional textbooks, according to the Association of American Publishers.

Comcast’s NBCUniversal has a service called NBC Learn that uses material from NBC News. Apple has sold thousands of iPads to schools and analysts expect K-12 to become a larger piece of its business. Barnes & Noble and Amazon have both positioned their e-reader devices as options for schools.

Gates said that although most costs for educational technology are coming down, “Internet access is the most expensive piece” of edtech — even more so than student hardware devices. That, he said, has to change, since Internet access is not just important in the classroom, but for learning to continue at home.